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Spoiler Warning! If you haven't seen Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, don't read this thread. The entire thing is one giant spoiler.
There are a lot of people out there that hate the Final Fantasy movie. There are really two camps of these people:
1) The disappointed FF fanatics. This group makes up the majority of the people that hated The Spirits Within. The people in this group were upset by the movie because, to them, it wasn't Final Fantasy. There was no magic, no swords, no summons, no spiky hair and no Sephiroth. The movie was an extreme sci-fi film, and there was little to no actual "fantasy" to be found in it.
2) The blind FF antagonists. These are the people that loathed the movie based on the fact that they hate Final Fantasy, and anything related to it. This makes up a much smaller group of the percentage.
The only other people that have any sort of opinion on it either simply weren't impressed with the movie for valid reasons (a small percentage) and people like me, who actually enjoyed the hell out of it (a small percentage).
My love for the movie stems not from the graphical presentation (which is still the best CG work in history; nothing comes close), not the central characters (Aki and Grey were so fucking boring) and not the plot progression ( I can think of at least three ways that the story could have been developed exponentially better). My love for the movie is centered on one specific character, the character currently featured in my signature and avatar: General Hein.
Why was he such an amazing character? Because he wasn't a stereotypical villain. He was certainly a person guilty of horrible things, and he was certainly worthy of the title "villain", but he wasn't a bad person. Let's take a quick look at the background information we're given in the film.
Hein was, at one point happily married, having sired a single child. He was a military man, and while not of the greatest position of power, he was respected. One day, while he was away from the San Francisco Barrier City (where he lived with his wife and child), the shield barrier failed, permitting the entry of a legion of Phantoms into his home. It was a massacre. Countless numbers of people wastefully lost their lives in the ensuing chaos, including his wife and daughter. Having had his family, the only thing in his life that truly mattered to him, brutally stripped away, he lost purpose in his existence. In a haze of sheer agony, he struggled with every ounce of his being to find a reason to continue living. In the end, he did find a purpose: to eliminate every last Phantom from the face of the Earth, regardless of the cost. Fueled by searing misery and blinding hatred, he rose through the ranks of the US Military until awarded the rank of General. Upon recieving such high honors, he used his newfound power to begin the construction of the Zeus Space Cannon, which would be used to burn every last Phantom out of the Leonid Meteor Crater that they seemed to endlessly spawn from. He would have his revenge, he would kill them all, and he would do whatever it took to reach that goal.
So, now that you understand the motivation behind his actions, let's examine the effects of such events.
The best way to truly sum up General Hein's value as a character is to say that he is more of a detriment to his own cause than he is a benefit. His overall objective, his entire purpose in life is to obliterate the Phantoms. The tied in implication with that notion is that he intends to save the world. While this certainly seems a chivalrous idea at first glance, "saving the world" isn't his goal. It's an inextractable bonus to his true goal. His true goal being vengeance. By successfully exacting his revenge on his enemies, he also saves the world. It is behind this guise of nobility that he hides his true desires, and it is through that scheme that he becomes such a brilliant manipulator.
But it is also because of those intentions that he poses the greatest threat to Earth's salvation. You see, he's not out to save the world. He's not out for glory, fame or power. He's out for blood. Under those circumstances, do you really think he'll be willing to allow someone else to steal his thunder by introducing a possibly more effective and safer method of success?
Enter Dr. Sid and Aki Ross with their Gaia Wave Theory. The theory they present in the movie is, by and large, practically guaranteed to succeed and to not yield any possibly detrimental side-effects. By basically dematerialzing the Phantoms through the Wave Theory, they don't risk harming the planet or it's inhabitants like the Zeus Cannon could very easily do. Any rational human being could see that this is certainly the better road to take. Hein is not a rational human being. Hein is a human being with extreme power, satanically persuasive talents and a presence more imposing than Jason Voorhees. Hein is a human being driven my misery, hatred and the lust for vengeance. He's not about to let Dr. Ross and Dr. Sid steal his opportunity for revenge with their pansy-ass Wave Theory.
And that's where the brilliance in his character shines through. His overall goal is the elimination of the Phantoms. However, the methods he feels he must use are not only possibly dangerous to all humanity, but also possibly ineffective as well. Dr. Ross and Dr. Sid, however, have devised a scheme that will practically guarantee the elimination of the Phantoms, while simultaneously protecting the planet and it's people. Hein, however, incapable of allowing his grief to just simply die, cannot allow this secondary method to be used, since it won't be he who pulls the trigger. Therefore, he proves to be a greater obstacle to his own plans than he is a benefit. He wants the Phantoms dead, but he can't allow someone else to do it for him, regardless of how much more effective or safe their methods may be.
The grief-stricken Hein's actions finally come to a head when he makes a risky move in an attempt to force the Council to pre-emptively approve the use of the Zeus Cannon, thereby giving him his chance for revenge. He allows the Manhattan Shield Barrier to be voluntarily deactivated for a short period of time, permitting a number of Phantoms to enter the city and possibly cause a bit of carnage. By lying to the Council and claiming that the Phantoms have begun to form an immunity to their Barriers, Hein would be able to convince the Council that Ross and Sid's Wave construction would take too long to risk any further, giving them no other choice than to approve the firing of the Zeus Cannon. This plan, however, backfires as the shield fails to re-ignite and an army of Phantoms floods the city, causing absolute decimation and innumerable deaths. It is in that moment that Hein experiences a personal catharsis. He has an epiphany, and comes to realize that he has become the very monster he's trying to destroy. By allowing himself to write off the deaths of thousands as "casualties of war", all for the sake of his own personal agenda, he has permitted himself to metamorphosize into the very evil he wishes to destroy. He realizes that he is solely responsible for a reapeat of the San Francisco massacre, and that he has now caused an unimaginable amount of people the same grief he has been struggling with for the last several years.
Escaping from the city, and reaching outer space, he realizes that he can no longer handle living knowing what he has become. Just as he's about to commit suicide in his escape pod, the proximity alert goes off, and he's warned by the pod's navigational system that he is within communication range of the Zeus Cannon. He realizes that he is now too far gone to simply give up. He has caused the deaths of thousands, and because of that, he must avenge them all. He heads out to the Cannon, boards and gives the command to begin firing. When the Zeus Cannon's blasts have no effect on the crater he snaps, taking the controls into his own hands, claiming that he will "blast them all to Hell." In his last moment he fires the Cannon a final time, causing the entire structure to overload, initiating a full explosion and killing everyone on board. He dies alone with the instrument of his revenge.
That's a lot of shit to read, but if you've made it this far, I applaud you. If you really examine all of that, it's easy to see why Hein is the most intriguing character of the bunch. He's not a megalomanical tyrant or a vagabond murderer. He's a tormented, tragic figure. He's a man driven to the apex of misery, pushed by his own unfaltering pain to commit horrendous acts. Any one of us could have found ourselves in the same situation. He's not a superhuman test tube SOLDIER, he's not an otherworldly sorcerer hell-bent on mass genocide. He's a human being, he's got weaknesses, and those flaws caused worlds of suffering to many. You and I are capable of the same thing. He's a tragic character that the viewer can relate to, and as such, his personal torment hits a lot closer to home.
I mentioned earlier how I could come up with a number of ways that the plot could have been handled better. This one is my favorite: if it was up to me, I would have added a completely new intro to the film. I would have added a ten to fifteen minute introduction that would have made the emotional value of this move skyrocket. Imagine this:
The movie opens on the San Francisco Barrier City. There are people bustling about, absorbed in their daily routine. Kids are playing, adults are walking to and fro and whatnot. The camera homes in on the interior of an apartment containing a mother and daughter, the daughter watching television and the mother speaking with someone over the phone. Back on the street, everything is pretty chipper. Then suddenly, buildings start blacking out in a wave pattern migrating outwards from the core of the city to the walls. People stop moving about, cell-phones (or whatever the equivalent would be this far in the future) hit the pavement, a ball rolls down the middle of the street, and everyone is looking at the sky. Back to the mother and daughter in the apartment, the power dies, and the woman on the phone repeatedly says a man's name (presumably the name of her husband, who we are to believe she was speaking with a few moments earlier) into the phone, a tremble hitting her voice on the last word. As the power-outage hits the edges of the city, the absolute worst happens. The barrier dissipates, and everyone is transfixed in horror. A few moments pass, and a single man standing in the middle of the street suddenly drops to the ground, dead. No visible reason for why he died, he just fell. Instantly the entire street is a panic zone. People flee in terror, screams echo through the alleyways and bodies pile on the streets. As the mother and daughter look out the window at the ensuing chaos, they look at each other, the mother picks up her child and the two hold each other. A few moments pass, and eventually both slump to the ground. Dead.
Obviously, the woman and child were intended to be Hein's wife and daughter, which would be later revealed to the viewer in a scene already contained in the movie. Imagine how much more powerful Hein's backstory would have been if we could have seen that at the beginning. It would have served to do a number of things. First, the viewer would be more intimately attached to Hein's internal struggle. We would have been more sympathetic to his agony, and as such, it would have made his image as a "villain" more complex in our eyes. Second, it would have made the Manhattan Barrier massacre scene that much more vital. Imagine if they had actually mirrored some of the same shots from the previous scene, mimicking some of the more notable deaths from the beginning of the movie. That would have served to make the viewer understand exactly what Hein had just done, and how much more agony he had just caused himself.
The addition of that single scene would have been enough to possibly put the audience in tears. It would have increased the tragic nature of Hein's character tenfold, and would have made the movie that much more complex.
In conclusion, General Hein is one of my favorite movie characters of all time. He single-handedly transformed The Spirits Within from an average sci-fi movie into a complex, intriguing and emotionally valuable film. On top of that, James Woods was the perfect choice to play Hein. His voice and line-delivery were impeccable, and he is honestly the only actor I can think of that could have given Hein the treatment he deserved. General Hein is an amazing character, and I hope that if you've read this entire post, that you'll agree.
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